Irish Planning Analysed

Since becoming part of Government, Minister for the Environment, John
Gormley, has declared on more than one occasion that he’s all in favour
of devolution of as much power as possible to local authorities. In
occasional effusions he has conjured up the idea of responsible
citizens exercising their civic duty by vigorously participating in
town meetings reminiscent of those held by early settlers in the
Puritan Halls of Colonial America. Mainly, I suppose, he wants us to
discuss planning.

All this, as the Minister has –
simultaneously – developed a reputation for exercising as much power
available to him to instruct Local Authorities on how better their
latest Development Plans might conform to his own visions on zoning,
sustainability, and so on.

The fact that he holds these
contradictory positions – greater local democracy on the one hand:
strong powers to override local opinion on the other – is something the
Minister himself is aware of; he intends to reconcile the dichotomy in
new planning legislation expected later this year which

“… will help to reduce the need for central government intervention in the local government development plan process…’

To do this he intends to:

‘… strengthen the local mandate by clarifying how planning authorities can and should better align their local policies and priorities with sound planning principles and with regional and national guidance… ” (emphasis provided)

Doublespeak?
Yes. Put plainly, the Minister wishes citizens to attend public
meetings at which they can figure out how to do exactly what he wants
them to do. Orwellian? No. The current Minister, like all the other
current Ministers and all the Ministers who’ve gone before them, use
Doublespeak to describe ideas they themselves might consider ‘nuanced’
but which are, as they always have been, just muddled. It’s the Irish
way.

Already, Gormley’s in trouble. At the end of August, to
the wild fury of Councillors of all colours and stripes who saw his
involvement as meddlesome and interfering, he instructed Waterford
County Council not to rezone lands around Dungarvan for future
development. The areas in question were small – not of the scale you’d
expect a Government Minister to have strong feelings about one way or
the other. Similarly, now, in Mayo the Minister is taking a firm stand
against rezoning proposals for parts of the County, especially around
Castlebar, where he perceives that the Council is trying to make it
easier to build single family homes outside of town centres. Mayo’s
Fine Gael Councillor., Paddy McGuinness, was quoted in The Times
defending the Council’s hard work in drafting up its plan and
protesting at the Minister’s intrusion as follows:

“Now
I feel my homework has been thrown back at me by an authoritative
teacher… all the positivity has been replaced by negativity.”

(Other councillors quoted in the same piece refer to the Minister’s actions as Cromwellian).

So,
the question becomes: why does John Gormley have a ‘preach
democracy/act dictatorial’ approach to planning? Is it A) Nascent
Stalinist tendencies? Or B) confusion about what the concept of spatial
planning in general – and the Development Plan in particular – is all
about?

I think the answer is ‘B’. The Minister’s irrational
response springs from a lack of comprehension of what the Development
Plan is supposed to achieve.

Irish Development Plans comprise
hundreds of pages of meaningless guff about tourism, social inclusion,
sustainability, transport, reduced CO2 emissions, cycle lanes,
population-increase projections (usually inaccurate), house price
increases (lately wildly inaccurate), politically correct sounding
commitments on how to provide traveller accommodation and so on, all of
which is cut and pasted by back room officials from the most recently
approved Development Plan from some neighbouring county (but with new
planning buzzwords inserted) which is then circulated to local interest
groups who are usually invited to comment (in highly controlled
environments) and, thereby somehow, take ‘ownership’ of a document
which stubbornly refuses to be owned or understood. Irish Development
Plans make a virtue of their lack of vision, their obfuscation, their
haphazardness and their lumpeness. They in no way reflect the image or
aspirations of the communities they claim to serve and for the six
years of their existence, they co-exist with these communities like
Triffids in a patch of tolerant but quietly unhappy daffodils.

In
enlightened societies, Development Plans are about the manipulation of
shared space for the common good. Effective plans have key ingredients:
they possess sufficient detail and imagination to present a clear,
tangible vision of how the area they refer to is to be developed as the
community evolves. A good Development Plan is not open to a multitude
of interpretations: the meaning of its contents should understood by
all in the same way. Good Development Plans are both prescriptive and
long term while, at the same time, flexible enough to allow for local
change whenever the need arises.

Crucially, the power to put
the Plan in place rest must in the hands of those to whom it will
affect. In other words, Development Plans should be initiated, debated,
moved forward, adjusted and adopted by the relevant community and not
some wandering local authority dilettante as content to regurgitate the
same Ladybird-book level ideas about sustainability whether employed in
Donegal or Wexford.

This idea of what a Development Plan ought
to be is a far cry from what we in Ireland have grown accustomed to:
however, a variety of excellent models are available to us to study –
these range from the Zoning Resolutions which act as the ‘scores’ to
the symphonic cities of the north eastern United States; the city as
collection-of-neighbourhoods concept which has given us the new
planning paradigm of Portland, Oregon; and the highly rational ‘dual
plan’ approach which, against all the odds, makes a city like Berlin
continue to excite.

The day when the Development Plan is
something periodically pinned up on the notice board at the entrance to
County Hall like a set of Junior Cert results is surely now past us. If
the Minister truly wants to see a greater devolution of power to local
communities and avoid the tedious process of constantly sitting on the
shoulder of rural authorities, he should take a long hard look at what
a Development Plan is and what it could be doing to better serve the
Irish people.